Lately, I have decided to marry the two things I spend
any money on: home entertainment and computer hardware. I
want to upgrade to a (dual?) athlon box in the next couple
of months, abandoning my still-capable dual celeron 366
machine. I realized that I'm still going to have a lot of
parts left over from that upgrade. I am also moving into a
new apartment with my friends, and I will be one of the few
people with any money for setting up some kind of home
entertainment system. My goal for the year is to get a
decent mid-sized tv, and a dvd player. If I'm lucky, I'd
like us to also get a receiver and a 5.1 speaker system.
The downside to this is that I will only have a DVD player
from which to play music. So, I want to take my current
computer and turn it into an MP3 jukebox of sorts. The
goals/constraints are as follows:

Easy for non-computer people to use

Network-connected

should double as an MP3 server for the house

Icecast server?

Should plug into the normal A/V system

should be easy to make new playlists

Ideally, it should have a remote

Should be cheap to do

The hard part is going to be how I make it easy to use...I
don't want to have to have a monitor. But I *do* have a
voodoo3 card with a tv-out. So it could plug into the TV
or something. But that still is unappealing. And I don't
want a full-size keyboard. Probably the best idea is to
have a web-based interface that other computers in the
house can access, to build up playlists. Then a remote
control to do normal stereo functions. Bonus points would
be if it could work from a universal remote. Anyway,
that's my little hardware project that I want to undertake
in a couple months. If anyone has any ideas on this, I'd
be interested in hearing them. ;-)